Posts Tagged ‘Apple’

Apple CEO Tim Cook poked holes in the libel that Israel is racist, and he praised the country for integrating minorities in the hi-tech sector.

Apple’s vice president of Hardware Technologies is an Arab from Haifa and a graduate from Technion, Johny Srouji

Cook’s testimony during his visit to Israel to inaugurate Apple’s new R & D center in Herzliya, next to Tel Aviv, contradicted the annual Israel Apartheid Week hate fest on American campuses.

“True innovation can only result from full access to education for all, regardless of race, religion, or sex,” he said. “We would like to learn from your experience in the US, in bringing education and technology to periphery groups and communities.”

Cook told President Reuven Rivlin that Apple has “an enormous admiration for Israel, not just as an important ally for the US, but as a place to do business.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to arrive in Israeli next week to launch his company’s new Israeli headquarters near Tel Aviv, Globes reported.

Israeli high-tech honchos and former President Shimon Peres at the inauguration in Herzliya, part of the Israeli version of Silicon Valley.

The Apple center will employ up to 800 people for development, marketing and sales. Apple has bought out two Israeli companies and hired their workers, as well as 150 employees laid off last year by Texas Instruments.

Apple has reportedly given Beijing access to the software used in its iPhones.

Aside from the obvious invasion of privacy the company has authorized with this action, there is a question of whether Apple has also now invited the Chinese government to indulge in further corporate hacking attempts within the United States.

The move was officially meant to allow the Chinese government to conduct “security inspections” allegedly intended to ensure the privacy of its citizens.

A report published in the Beijing News claimed that Apple CEO Tim Cook authorized the security checks, which reportedly were also to ensure that foreign governments could not use the iPhones within China for surveillance.

However, the Chinese government is also believed to have performed “man-in-the-middle attacks” on citizens using iCloud and similar tools, Pando.com reported.

Numerous nations have rushed to begin doing business with Beijing in the past several years, including the State of Israel. But as the world hurtles towards the mammoth Asian market that dangles in the East, the apparently forgotten difference in culture and mentality is a chasm equally wide.

“This would mark the first time Apple and China have conspired to compromise the security and privacy of people outside the country,” Nathaniel Mott wrote in his Jan. 23, 2015 article on the website. “But it’s not the first time people inside China have had to worry about Apple’s cozy relationship with the government.”

Mott has written previously about Apple and its iPhones in China, explaining that Beijing expects to receive any data it requests from companies with servers on its territory. Apple revealed in August 2014 that it stores customer data in China through a partnership with China Telecom, a state-owned wireless service provider, Mott wrote.

“Some fear Apple may have provided the source code to the operating system used in its iPhones and iPads. If that’s true, the security of those devices has been severely harmed,” he warned. “Percy Alpha, a member of the GreatFire censorship watchdog, told Quartz that it could allow China to discover vulnerabilities in Apple’s software that it could later exploit.”

Google has struggled with the Beijing government since 2006, when it first launched its search function in China, to maintain a semblance of autonomy for users.

At present the ruling Communist party at various times of the year forces internet users to fully identify themselves to service providers, and periodically blocks international versions of the search engine. Also blocked in China at those times are Picasa, Maps, Translate and Calendar.

“China currently uses every method of censorship in the book,” notes GreatFire, “from bandwidth throttling, keyword filtering and site blocking to the wholesale intimidation of the press.”

Business experts contend, however, that such tight censorship can only be maintained for so long, before the country’s economic needs outweigh its demand for control.

The agreement will enhance cooperation between Israel and California in a variety of areas, with a focus on water conservation, alternative energy, cybersecurity, health and biotechnology, education and agricultural technology, according to a press release from Brown’s office.

The agreement also allows Israeli companies access to a variety of Californian technology research facilities, including technology incubators, research parks, federal laboratories and universities.

“Through this agreement, California and Israel will build on their respective strengths in research and technology to confront critical problems we both face, such as water scarcity, cybersecurity and climate change,” said Governor Brown in the statement.
Netanyahu said “the opportunities of our partnerships are truly limitless. They’re limited only by our imagination.” While in California, Netanyahu also met with Apple CEO Tim Cook, as well as with Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the founders of text message service WhatsApp.

Apple has made short shrift of recent denials of Israel’s PrimeSense gesture recognition company that it is being bought out and has and confirmed on Monday it is paying $359 million for the firm.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said Apple in a statement following 18 months of negotiations.

PrimeSense was founded as a start-up in 2005. Its software is embedded in Microsoft’s Kinect system and is used in Xbox 360 game consoles. Its gesture recognition technology allows purchasers to use their tablets to buy clothing by scanning their bodies.

Apple will embed PrimeSense’s technology in it smart TV that is scheduled to hit the market in 2015, Globes reported. Apple might also install the technology in iPads.

The acquisition is Apple’s second in Israel. Two years ago, it paid $400 million for Anobit.

The Saudi kingdom has kept a suspicious silence over President Barack Obama and his Western allies’ deal with Iran, but one of its wealthiest billionaires princes, who owns lots of shares in Twitter, Apple and News Corp., has minced no words to express no confidence in Obama.

He also happens to be a nephew of King Abdullah.

“There’s no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran,” Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, told Bloomberg News.

Then he blurted out a whopper by saying. “We’re really concerned.” The “we” is “Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East countries,” he said.

It is no secret that Riyadh and Jerusalem are privately in cahoots again Iran, but when the king’s billionaire nephew publicly states Israel is an ally against the White House, somebody at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should start cleaning out his ears.

His comments came hours before the deal with Iran was announced, but he presumably figured Obama would surrender and let Iran win the bargaining session.

“Obama is in so much of a rush to have a deal with Iran,” he said. “He wants anything. He’s so wounded. It’s very scary. Look, the 2014 elections are going to begin. Within two months they’re going to start campaigning. Thirty-nine members of his own party in the House have already moved away from him on Obamacare. That’s scary for him.”

Open criticism of Obama playing politics on the life-or-death issue of a nuclear Iran is pretty harsh stuff and might have made it a bit easier for the Kingdom to refrain from saying what it really thinks – that Obama does not understand anything about the Middle East or simply could not care less.

Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan a few weeks ago said that if President Obama continues to accommodate Iran, it might make a “major shift” away from Washington. And “away” from the White House means closer to the Zionist entity. It is amazing what some people will do to survive.

Prince Awaleed’s openly lumping the Kingdom with Israel and “other Middle East countries” cannot be shooed away as a one man’s opinion. Bloomberg noted that his “public statements are often interpreted as a barometer for the thoughts of Saudi’s rulers.”

Obama may be buying off Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States by offering them more security guarantees, but after Obama ditched Saudi Arabia and backed off its threat to attack Syrian President Bassar al-Assad for using chemical weapons, who trusts Washington any longer?

It is assumed Israel has nuclear warheads, and Saudi Arabia already has not kept it a secret that it would try to get its hands on nuclear weapons via Pakistan if Iran goes nuclear, so what guarantees does Washington have to offer?

The agreement with Iran by the Western powers, headed by Obama, puts the president in the saddle for the time being. Except for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, no one – not even Saudi Arabia – is going to second-guess Obama and not give the deal a chance.

Obama has neutralized Israel and silenced Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and, according to Israel’s Channel 10 television, he will use the deal to promote its agenda to solve all of the problems in the Middle East.

The television station reported that Obama will now figure it can pressure Iran, and even Russia, to help solve the Syrian civil war. With that under his belt, it is only a short hop skip and a jump to crown the Palestinian Authority as the non-nuclear weapon to destroy Israel by squeezing it into its old “Auschwitz borders” until the next step of flooding it with Palestinian Authority “immigrants.”

Given President Obama’s track record on Obamacare, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and about every other country outside of Antarctica, it is a fair assumption that things will fall apart quickly. If it indeed is Obama’s plan to march to world peace with Iran at its side, the man forgets, or doesn’t even know, that he really does not understand the Middle East or simply could not care less.

The ink was hardly dry on the deal when U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani already interpreted it differently.

Tehran said the agreement leaves it with the right to enrich uranium, even if its low grade, while Kerry denied that the deal recognized Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium.

Perhaps a “bad deal” was better than no deal because once the bad deal is exposed for what it is, the Western powers can go back to square one and start over with common sense.